I got it to record and play today for the first time. But it played sideways, I guess the camera orientation is off.

I did have trouble finding the right player to make it work in.

I got it working with Video Pad / Video Editor from the link provided from a user in a previous message.

Thank you!

It's good to see that it is indeed possible. I guess it needs a lot more work at this time.

Especially since we can't view directly on the Pre, and the User Interface needs to be built. I do understand what we are testing is using just a plain interface to test the feasibility of video recording.

So it's proof to me that it can be done, there is no question.

Now, it seems that this needs much more development before it can ever get out there.

And if Palm is not going to bring this to use, then it should be done by the developers here in Homebrew.

But whatever is made, it's got to be made so it's simple to use and simple to playback.

So if normal players can't be made to with with these files, then the app or package shold include the proper player to go along with the package. Just so users have all they need to make it work.

Recording is not enough, you need to provide the play back function to make this what everyone is asking for.

But I am tickled pink over seeing the video I made. It was like I was sitting in NASA's control room waiting for the first pictures to come back from 'Spirit' from Mars!

If you've ever seen these documentaries, the whole room lets out a big round of cheers!

So I give big cheer, to all the people that were involved to help get this to this point.

this may be completely incorrect or down right ridiculous: but couldn't you edit or Remix (similar to the Music app with improved functionality and additional features) the existing Video app to start the Camcorder and save to "Video" for playback??

this may be completely incorrect or down right ridiculous: but couldn't you edit or Remix (similar to the Music app with improved functionality and additional features) the existing Video app to start the Camcorder and save to "Video" for playback??

I think the problem, at the moment, is that the current method of recording video saves the files in a format that the Pre's internal player cannot play.

That doesn't mean that you couldn't use a Linux utility to convert it though. I could see someone making a homebrew camcorder app, where they make the current call to record video, then separately-record the audio with another call, then combine the streams, and convert to a more standard format. The conversion stuff shouldn't be too hard, but I don't know how powerful the Pre is in that regard.

No converting needed. Problem is the CLI we are using is spitting out a pure h264 stream with no container. We need to wrap it in an mp4 container (H.264 +AAC audio) for it to play correctly with the webOS Video player.

It seems like we have all the pieces here, we just need an app that can capture the h.264 and aac streams into a mp4 container.

No converting needed. Problem is the CLI we are using is spitting out a pure h264 stream with no container. We need to wrap it in an mp4 container (H.264 +AAC audio) for it to play correctly with the webOS Video player.

It seems like we have all the pieces here, we just need an app that can capture the h.264 and aac streams into a mp4 container.

THANK YOU whoever you are. I check this thread all the time just for this reason. You are the first person here to make any sense in days. I really thought for a moment all hope was lost here in PC.net

The issue is indeed involving a raw h264 stream, although the palmvideoencoder also supports h263, and mpeg-4 bitstreams by passing an element property value. The only available container for the version of gstreamer/gst-base/glib/glibc on the pre is ffmp4_mux, which quite honestly, is buggy, unstable, and just generally bad.

I'm currently working on backporting qtmux, which would fix this up in a jiffy as it includes the container element mp4mux. I've also opted for the x264enc built on libx264, as it seems more stable than palms encoder. Part of the reason they had to build a custom encoder it would seem, is because the custom patched v4l2 (camsrc) is uh.. rather incomptaible.. with anything. In fact, even trying to pipeline to fakesink (gst-launch camsrc ! fakesink) fails. Deregistering camsrc and using the v4l2src element fixes this (although it breaks the camera app). A simple fix, I suppose, would be to change the name of camsrc to .so.orig, register v4l2, record, and then deregister v4l2/register palm's plugin afterwards.

THANK YOU whoever you are. I check this thread all the time just for this reason. You are the first person here to make any sense in days. I really thought for a moment all hope was lost here in PC.net

Thanks I appreciate it. I have been working with codecs and video files forever so this shouldn't be too hard for us to work together to get this done.

Originally Posted by Prenosicator

The issue is indeed involving a raw h264 stream, although the palmvideoencoder also supports h263, and mpeg-4 bitstreams by passing an element property value. The only available container for the version of gstreamer/gst-base/glib/glibc on the pre is ffmp4_mux, which quite honestly, is buggy, unstable, and just generally bad.

I'm currently working on backporting qtmux, which would fix this up in a jiffy as it includes the container element mp4mux. I've also opted for the x264enc built on libx264, as it seems more stable than palms encoder. Part of the reason they had to build a custom encoder it would seem, is because the custom patched v4l2 (camsrc) is uh.. rather incomptaible.. with anything. In fact, even trying to pipeline to fakesink (gst-inspect camsrc ! fakesink) fails. Deregistering camsrc and using the v4l2src element fixes this (although it breaks the camera app). A simple fix, I suppose, would be to change the name of camsrc to .so.orig, register v4l2, record, and then deregister v4l2/register palm's plugin afterwards.

I am a bit unclear if moving to another encoder will work. I believe Palm's encoder is hardware accelerated which allows the high quality H264 video. Will the x264enc pull the h264 stream from hardware or will it try and encode via the CPU?

mp4mux sounds great! Hopefully we can get this going. Were you able to make any strides with the sound portion?

I am a bit unclear if moving to another encoder will work. I believe Palm's encoder is hardware accelerated which allows the high quality H264 video. Will the x264enc pull the h264 stream from hardware or will it try and encode via the CPU?

mp4mux sounds great! Hopefully we can get this going. Were you able to make any strides with the sound portion?

I'm confused as to your ideas about palmvideoencoder. It seems to be completely closed source and proprietary. I suppose the only tips we have about it is what we can see from the files it outputs, maybe it will become clear once we contain it.

BUT, and a big but, to my knoweldge, the gpu is currently 100% unused. Even the DSP seems to only be used by MediaServer and there are no opensource parts of the code available for peeking at.

Also, from various GST_DEBUG pages (by various, I mean too many to count), it would seem x264enc handles the bitstream well, even if it's CPU encoded. The other big problem with using palms video driver and video encoder, is they are limited to values in things like resolution / framerate / bitrate, and they seem unresponsive to suggestions otherwise.

As far as things like efficiency and audio go, I don't really want to tackle anything untill I can get a _working_ container. Backporting qtmux is proving to be a _HUGE_ hassle (although I'm no backporting expert). Then the trouble would be, once I get it working, somehow repeating the process. Honestly tho, qtmux by itself might work with minimum adjustments or instalations of other modules (simply with the current camsrc ! palmvideoencoder ! pipeline), which might be ideal.

I wish Andrew James was around more often He's really done a ton of work on audio support, and what I believe was the first ogg and flac songs to play on a pre He even got mediaserver to recognize ogg in music player (although it wouldn't play them).

For full set of information, check out the webos-internals.org "Gstreamer" page, as well as the "Video Recording" page, both in the "Research" section.

PM me with your nick, and we can collaboate on #webos-internals (freenode irc). Ta ta!

Just made this video a few minutes ago, and I am pleasantly surprised at the quality. It was supposed to stop recording after about 30 seconds but as you can see it kept recording right through a phone call I made, and all the way until I plugged it into the computer.

hmmm got this to work pretty easy, very cool, obviously watching them on the phone right away and having a better GUI would be awesome but just being able to record so soon after the phone was released with this feature completely missing, very cool!